Bulgaria

Bulgarian is the official language in Bulgaria and it is spoken by 8.5 million people. Bulgarian has two main dialects. The eastern dialect is used as the literary language.

Bulgaria was ruled under the Ottoman Empire for 500 years until 1878. Bulgarian survived in the countryside while the language was heavily influenced by the Turks, Macedonians, and Romanies (Gypsies) in the cities. The language situation in Bulgaria is rather complicated.

About one million people in Bulgaria speak Turkish.

At present, the Macedonians are spread out over Yugoslavia, Greece, and Bulgaria. About 250,000 Macedonians live in Bulgaria, and speak Macedonian. It is used only as a spoken language. It is similar to Bulgarian.

The language of the Romanies is called Romani, and is used only as a spoken language.

There are large amounts of loanwords in Bulgarian especially from Turkish and Greek. People try to avoid using them when writing, but they survive in the spoken language. The vocabulary is also influenced by Russian.

Both Bulgarian and Macedonian belong to the South Slavic branch of the Slavic language group within the Indo-European language family. They are related to Slovene and Serbo-Croatian.